The Kremlin warned on Wednesday that the exploding pager attack on the Lebanese group Hezbollah and others could cause a wider regional conflict and called for an investigation to identify the perpetrators.
Thousands of pagers were detonated in Tuesday’s attack across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including Hezbollah fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that Israel’s Mossad intelligence service planted explosives in 5,000 pagers imported by the Lebanese Hezbollah group months before the detonations.
The Taiwanese company, whose pagers are in question, announced that it has nothing to do with them and that the company based in Hungary is responsible for them, which has the right to use their brand in the production of pagers.
“What happened, whatever it was, certainly leads to an escalation of tensions. The (Middle East) region itself is in an explosive state, and certainly an incident like this, any one of them, has the potential to be a trigger for the situation to get out of control.” , Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“Of course, we believe that a detailed investigation of this incident should be carried out, the causes and circumstances of what happened should be established and, of course, those responsible for these mass explosions of communication equipment should be identified,” he said.
The findings of such an investigation would allow specialists to eliminate the risk of something similar happening in Russia or elsewhere, Peskov added.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier on Wednesday that the attack was part of a hybrid war against Lebanon that has killed thousands of innocent people.
“It appears that the organizers of this high-tech attack deliberately wanted to instigate a larger-scale armed conflict in order to cause a wider war in the Middle East,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
